From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward

This new edition of this book includes fewer essays than the original edition, which was too long to be issued in print form at a reasonable price. It has been shortened in order to offer paperback and audiobook editions of essays about space that the author feels are worth preserving in those formats. (The omitted essays and the appendix “Space Quotes to Ponder” will remain available at her website.)

Sylvia Engdahl became fascinated by the idea of space travel in 1946, and has believed since the early 1950s that expansion of our species to other worlds is vital to the preservation of Earth and the future survival of humankind. Many of the essays in this book express her conviction that we should not be discouraged by the public's reluctance to support space activity, since all past human progress has been brought about by visionaries who did not have the backing of their contemporaries. The shock of realizing during the moon landings that contact with the vast and perhaps peril-fraught universe is no longer mere fiction dampened the enthusiasm of the majority, but this was a natural reaction comparable seventeenth century people's resistance to the idea that Earth is not, as formerly thought, safely enclosed within crystal spheres that hold up the celestial bodies. It will pass, and we need have no doubt that generations who come after us will venture forth from this green Earth and find their way to the stars.

The following essays are included.

The Once and Future Dream (new)
Thoughts on the 50th Anniversary of the First Moon Landing
Breaking Out from Earth's Shell
Why Does the History of Outlook Toward Space Matter?
Confronting the Universe in the Twenty-First Century
Space and Human Survival
The Only Sensible Way to Deal with Climate Change
Update on the Critical Stage: The Far Side of Evil’s Relevance Today
Space Colonization, Faith, and Pascal’s Wager
Why There Will Never Be an Interplanetary War
Humankind's Future in the Cosmos